Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the use of mobile devices in conjunction with wireless networks, such as WiFi networks. At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the creation and enjoyment of digital video content. This is in part due to the fact that millions of people around the world now carry mobile phones, cameras or other devices that are capable of capturing high quality video and/or of playing back video streams in a convenient manner.
In some contexts in which a processing device—e.g., a video processing device adapted to receive video content from multiple mobile devices or “clients” over a wireless network via an access point—it is often the case that a number of other access points might be operating in the same area and receiving/transmitting packets within the same channel(s) as the processing device. The resulting competition over resources (i.e., between access points and the mobile devices themselves) can negatively affect the bandwidth available for data transmission between the individual mobile devices and the processing device, particularly in the case of the transmission of video and other high-bandwidth data.
It is therefore desirable to create systems and methods for dynamically determining the health (e.g., bandwidth, capacity, etc.) of a wireless network and using that information to improve the user experience for users of that network. Other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.